There are two major problems with most Homestuck update checkers. For one,
they rely on MSPA's RSS feed, which is often a few minutes behind. The other issue
is that they can slow down MSPA's website. This website is designed in such a way
that neither of these issues even exist.

Rather than having everyone access MSPA directly, this website does that on the server
side, so that it only has to check MSPA once every 5 seconds, no matter how many people
are using this upd8 checker. Additionally, this uses a much more reliable source to check
whether there's an update or not: the text files used to generate the MSPA pages themselves.
When there's no page, trying to access the text file will return a 404 status code.
Otherwise, it will return 200. This website looks at what page will be next, and refreshes
that every 5 seconds to see if the page exists yet. If it does exist, it'll send it over
to reddit, an IRC channel, and this little file
to notify people of the update.

When an update is found, the file will change to something like
showupd8("009309", "[S] ACT 6 ACT 6 ACT 5", 12);
which will tell this page to show a link & make a sound to notify anyone connected
to this page that Homestuck has updated.